Yet Another Evil Little War

Attacking Syria has been the talk in Washington for years, all the way
back toBush II’s infamous "Axis of Evil" speech. The current
(un)civil war started back in March 2011, out of the failed attempt to topple
the government through another "Arab Spring" revolution, organized
by the American Empire. As in Libya, the response to failure was escalation
into an armed rebellion.

The Empire had openly
intervened in the Libyan war within a month. Libya was close to NATO bases
in Italy, and had no allies, yet it still took six months of fighting to murder
Col. Gadhafi and depose his government. Furthermore, the war’s "legality"
was based on the flimsy pretext of UNSCR
1973, authorizing a no-fly zone, which was then creatively reinterpreted
as a blank check for "regime change."

Once Libya was thought secured – erroneously, as it
turned out – the Eye of the Empire turned towards Damascus. Several times
over the past two years, a play was made to intervene in Syria. Time and again,
it was walked back. Now, however, a pretext has been invoked, and the Obama
White House has declared its willingness to ignore the UN and overwhelming popular
opposition, and attack
anyway.

There is still some room for voices of reason to prevail, but odds are we
are in for yet another Evil
Little War.

Replicating Racak

The notion of "humanitarian" intervention is commonly dated back
to the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Tony Blair concocted a "doctrine"
called R2P – responsibility to protect – as a way to intervene in affairs of
other countries by force. Using the precedent established
in Bosnia, Clinton and Blair attacked what was then the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia, supposedly to "stop a genocide" (that their propaganda
invented) in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

If this sounds even remotely familiar, that is because it closely resembles
a pretext Hitler used – alleged violation of "human rights" of ethnic
Germans – to annex Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, invade Poland in 1939,
and attack Yugoslavia
in 1941.

Selling a "humanitarian" war to the general public requires a pretext.
A ghastly atrocity works
best. In Bosnia, three bombings around a Sarajevo marketplace – in 1992,
1994 and 1995 – each served to escalate international involvement, culminating
in an open NATO intervention.

For Kosovo, Clinton
and Blair had Racak:
a village where OSCE observers – led by NATO military intelligence officers
– declared the Yugoslav forces had "massacred civilians." In reality,
Racak had been a battle between police and the KLA, a terrorist organization
seeking to separate Kosovo from Serbia and make it into an Albanian state.

The pretext chosen for attacking Syria is that the government had used chemical
weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Empire’s entire
case rests on claims by the rebels and some YouTube videos. Numerous analysts
and experts point out that Ghouta has all the hallmarks of a false
flag operation – plans for which were discovered earlier
this year.

A Long-Planned Campaign

Leaked documents reveal that a plan to attack Syria was developed back
in 2011. The Empire and its rebel clients have been looking for ways to
create a pretext for intervention ever since.

Ghouta is just the latest in a series of manufactured incidents. Back in the
summer of 2011, Western media hyped the hear-rending dispatches from Amina Arraf,
a "gay girl in Damascus" – who turned out to be a sock-puppet. The
actual writer, an American living in Scotland, defended
the fraud by claiming he "raised awareness" and that "Amina’s"
writing was "fiction but true."

At one point, Turkey seemed eager to lead the war effort, so Ankara claimed
that Syrian forces had shelled its border towns. War seemed imminent when a
Turkish
F-4 was shot down in June 2012. Since then, however, Turkey has become busy
with other
problems.

The rebels then tried to provide a pretext of their own, arguing multiple
massacres. As each got
exposed as a fraud, the war drums would fall silent – for a while. The rebels’
jihadist
proclivities and video footage of cannibalism
did little to bolster their cause. So the Empire stepped in, clearly spelling
out that a trigger for intervention would be a major chemical attack.

One was alleged in June
this year, but the drive to intervention foundered on the shoal of facts
once again. The incident in Ghouta happened just as the government was winning
the war, and precisely when the UN inspection team was visiting. To believe
this was providential coincidence makes absolutely
no sense. Yet that is what the mainstream media would have everyone believe
– as well as that the Syrian government is murdering its own civilians en masse,
and that the rebels are noble – if jihadist – fighters for freedom, democracy
and tolerance. Except when it comes
to Christians, of course.

White-Knighting

There is nothing "humanitarian" about war. Ever. Any war, no matter
how noble the cause, involves killing people. The way the Empire sells it to
the general public – already fed a garbage diet of celebrity scandals and gutter
gossip – is that precision munitions bloodlessly eliminate "evildoers"
with no loss of innocent (or American) lives.

To believe this, one must also believe in the miraculous transubstantiation
of anyone killed by Imperial ordnance into an "enemy combatant." In
reality, far from being bloodless, interventions result in mass
death of civilians supposedly being "helped"– which the Empire,
supposedly so concerned about their well-being, doesn’t even bother
to count.

"Humanitarian" interventionism has little
or nothing to do with people supposedly being "rescued", but everything
to do with creating and maintaining the image of Empire as the heroic rescuer.
This sort of global white-knighting is pure
narcissism.

The Balkans Pattern

Time
and again,
the mainstream media have compared Syria to Kosovo. Some interventionists have
even drawn parallels with Bosnia – such as Michael
Ignatieff. The Washington Post recently ran a plea
for intervention by the Bosnian (Muslim) FM and his Turkish colleague, recycling
the myths of the Bosnian War.

It is no accident that the 1999
attack on Yugoslavia – illegal, illegitimate and unjust – is being invoked
as a precedent for further Imperial action. Even the critics of attacking
Syria – such as Leon
Hadar – operate under the mistaken assumption that the Balkans interventions
were a success. This is simply not
true, though it may seem otherwise to those willing to ignore inconvenient
facts.

Because the myths about the Balkan interventions have been left unchallenged,
they are repeatedly
used to justify new wars – as Diana Johnstone puts it, "justify
the unjustifiable" – Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Mali
earlier this year, and now Syria.

Few remember, due to the fog of propaganda, that NATO’s pretext for attacking
in 1999 was to impose the "Rambouillet agreement" – a deliberately
unacceptable
ultimatum misrepresented as a peace treaty. When Belgrade defied expectations
of a quick surrender, new pretexts were conjured: allegations of mass murder,
forced expulsion, mass rape, concentration camps, genocide, etc. Ultimately,
it came down to continuing the war for the sake of NATO’s "credibility":
the Alliance had no choice but to intervene, or it would appear foolish.

But as one blogger commenting on the Syria situation put
it bluntly, "if your hand can be forced, what power do you have"?

Treason

There is another component to the Syria situation to consider. The Syrian rebels
– financed, armed
and trained by the
Empire – have acknowledged links to Al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization designated
as the primary enemy of the United States in the "war" declared in
September 2001. Giving any sort of aid to Al-Qaeda is an act of treason.

Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert
Fisk wondered the other day if Obama knew he was helping Al-Qaeda. There
is no good answer to this. If the Emperor knows, he is guilty of treason. But
if he doesn’t know, then he is manifestly unfit for office.

Despite the massive media blitz, the drumbeat for war on Syria
missed a step this Thursday, when the UK House of Commons voted
against the war, and left British interventionists fumbling
at their failure to back the Empire.

Meanwhile, Russia is sending
warships to the Mediterranean. And it just happens that Russia’s
largest naval facility outside the former USSR is the Syrian port of Tartus.

There is still hope that the rush to madness might
be avoided. If the Emperor wants to actually earn his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize,
he should listen to the words of a blogger that sounds more sensible drunk
than all his advisors do sober:

"I don’t know what to do about Syria. But I know what not to do, which
is set a bunch of 20 year old kids on fire."

Author: Nebojsa Malic

Nebojsa Malic left his home in Bosnia after the Dayton Accords and currently resides in the United States. During the Bosnian War he had exposure to diplomatic and media affairs in Sarajevo. As a historian who specializes in international relations and the Balkans, Malic has written numerous essays on the Kosovo War, Bosnia, and Serbian politics. His exclusive column for Antiwar.com debuted in November 2000.